Ideas. Initiatives. Suggestions. They are all types of observations that most companies generate one way or another and many Falcony customers have also found a way to use our platform for. Today we are proudly launching Falcony | Ideas, an idea generation solution that works naturally as part of the Falcony Platform.
This is the first blog post from our recent launch event held on the 16st of November 2023. More blog posts about other updates will follow soon.
The problem of too many reporting systems
We live in a different world now. Today, how we communicate in our personal lives is setting new standards for how we operate in our work lives. With Whatsapp and other instant communication tools, we have all learned to expect everything to be available with just a few clicks and without a fuzz of making multiple decisions that tax your mind.
For those who consider that it's not for your company - your employees being different, let's put some factual numbers here. Already today the native digital generations represent more than 50% of the workforce and in ten years that number is going to be 75%. Of these, the majority say that lacking tools like Whatsapp, they would rather stop communicating instead of sticking to phone calls or even talking in person.
Whether ideas, incidents or any other reporting or workflow solution, they all need to consider the preferred communication methods. And the more people are using those solutions, the more it matters. Regardless of which generation we belong to, we all want to do great work, to be involved and to have a voice.
If we think about it, initiatives and ideas are just types of observations. We as managers like to talk about incidents, non-conformities, defects, initiatives or bugs. But for employees, who are the people most aware of them, they just notice that something is not working or something could be done much better. And this is a problem that often grows bigger, the more reporting tools companies have for different purposes.
Most of the idea generation solutions on the market face the same risks as any other reporting tools. They compete for the employees’ attention against other reporting tools, resulting in low adoption and low reporting rates.
Ultimately when employees don't know which "bucket" their idea or issue belongs to, they simply tell it to nobody.
And when employees won't share their ideas, it leads to lost opportunities leaving both potential new revenues and greater profits on the table. There's not a single company that can survive without continuous improvement, constant renewal and rapid experimentation. All those begin with idea generation.
Falcony | Ideas
Like mentioned, the outcome of all idea generation is opportunities taken, innovations delivered and ultimately greater revenue or profits. But to capitalise on them, on the upstream are the generated ideas. Some of them relate to existing implementations, some of them are about new improvements and some even wild new business ideas.
With Falcony, idea generation is a seamless part of the platform that already covers incidents, observations, audits, inspections and hundreds other reports, which means that employees don’t need to overcome the mental burden of deciding which solution their idea belongs to. They can simply go to Falcony and share their thoughts with just a few clicks.
Switching from their previous idea generation solutions, we've already seen our customers to increase their idea reporting rates 50-fold - that's 4900% increase. And we strongly believe we can grow that much further.
And besides the amount of ideas, Falcony tends to have culture-shifting impact on many organisations: when more people share their ideas and actually hear what happens to those ideas, it creates a positive flywheel of them wanting to share even more ideas. This experience of being heard increases psychological safety which is one of the most important factors of not only increased reporting rates but also employee retention and team performance.
It all comes back to involvement.
The functionalities of Falcony | Ideas
Falcony Ideas is a very close sister to the Falcony Observe product. It allows you to involve all your employees to share, comment, track and implement all types of ideas, initiatives, improvements and actions. All this with hyper-intuitive user interface, built-in reporting capabilities and of course the same level of enterprise readiness as with the rest of our platform.
It works of course on any device, whether computer, tablet or mobile and you should expect that the majority of the ideas come from mobile devices as ideas can pop up anywhere. Besides the independence of devices, the we have always worked hard to show end-users that any and all kinds of ideas are welcomed. Hence, the icon-based categorisation of different types of ideas.
Not all ideas are something you want to share with your name attached to it and that’s why Falcony also includes the possibility to share ideas confidentially. This way whoever has the idea, don't have to worry about fear of embarrassment or fear of being rejected - two big barriers of idea generation.
Falcony also intelligently routes the ideas to the correct assignees and participants in real-time based on organisational hierarchy and the types of the ideas. This way the feedback loop stays rapid and ideas get implemented faster. And if nobody replies to the idea, there are automated reminders in place to make sure something gets done at some point.
All this happens to serve the purpose of involving even more people to refine the ideas. Why? Because when it comes to ideas and initiatives, they are rarely ready to be implemented immediately. Some of the ideas die immediately but others get better with feedback, critique, meetings and communication.
There are also separate workflows with required and optional fields for different idea categories. Some initiatives have workflows for rewards and others have more detailed workflows about the prioritisation, voting or implementation process of the idea. But we can also always fit Falcony to the already existing processes that our customers may already have for idea generation, tracking and implementation.
Ideas can of course come from not just employees, but also from third parties, which is covered with something that we call open links. They don't require login and can easily be launched from QR-codes.
Integrations
Like any of our other products in Falcony family, there’s of course the usual integrations like single-sign on, HR integration and business intelligence database connections, to name a few. If you already have these integrations set, it’s very easy to simply replicate them to the
workspace too.
But when it comes to ideas, we actually have more! We can also integrate the ideas themselves to move bidirectionally to another system, like Sharepoint, project management software or even a separate innovation software where innovations are managed. This way Falcony works as the “Frontend” where all employees and stakeholders share their ideas but depending on the idea, they can move to other systems.
Bonus: Innovation Audit
Instead of just allowing for ideas to be shared, tracked and implemented, we have included an audit template to make it transparent where the idea generation and innovation management falls short and it’s called the innovation audit. It's a simple self-assessment template that can be conducted periodically and the organisation gets an understanding on how their employees see the innovation strategy, idea generation, prioritization, implementation, innovation culture and innovation output work. Each section is bite sized into separate questions, so it also highlights the areas what to do to avoid missing opportunities. And it does that on a company level but also on the business unit, function, branch or even site level, so different teams might need to do different things to improve the idea management.
Conclusion
Just like Falcony Whistleblowing, Falcony Ideas will be a new low-threshold way of getting familiar with Falcony and then expand the use to other processes and functions.
Simply reach out to use and let's book a meeting to discuss more! Or start a free trial to see Falcony in action:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
